She nodded.
“I see.”
“Why wouldn’t you marry me five years ago, Diamond Dick?”
“I don’t know,” she said after a minute’s hesitation, “I was wrong.”
“Wrong!” he exclaimed bitterly. “You talk as if it had been guesswork, like betting on white or red.”
“No, it wasn’t guesswork.”
There was a silence for a minute—then she turned to him with shining eyes.
“Won’t you kiss me, Charley?” she asked simply.
He started.
“Would it be so hard to do?” she went on. “I’ve never asked a man to kiss me before.”
With an exclamation he jumped off the wall.
“I’m going to the city,” he said.
“Am I—such bad company as all that?”
“Diana.” He came close to her and put his arms around her knees and looked into her eyes. “You know that if I kiss you I’ll have to stay. I’m afraid of you—afraid of your kindness, afraid to remember anything about you at all. And I couldn’t go from a kiss of yours to—another girl.”
“Good-by,” she said suddenly.
He hesitated for a moment then he protested helplessly.
“You put me in a terrible position.”
“Good-by.”
“Listen Diana——”
“Please go away.”
He turned and walked quickly toward the house.
Diana sat without moving while the night breeze made cool puffs and ruffles on her chiffon dress. The moon had risen higher now, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjos on the lawn.
Alone at last—she was alone at last. There was not even a ghost left now to drift with through the years. She might stretch out her arms as far as they could reach into the night without fear that they would brush friendly cloth. The thin silver had worn off from all the stars.
She sat there for almost an hour, her eyes fixed upon the points of light on the other shore. Then the wind ran cold fingers along her silk stockings so she jumped off the wall, landing softly among the bright pebbles of the sand. .
“Diana!”
Breck was coming toward her, flushed with the excitement of his party.
“Diana! I want you to meet a man in my class at New Haven. His brother took you to a prom three years ago.”
She shook her head.
“I’ve got a headache; I’m going upstairs.”
Coming closer Breck saw that her eyes were glittering with tears.
“Diana, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Something’s the matter.”
“Nothing, Breck. But oh, take care, take care! Be careful who you love.”
“Are you in love with—Charley Abbot?”
She gave a strange, hard little laugh.
“Me? Oh, God, no, Breck! I don’t love anybody. I wasn’t made for anything like love. I don’t even love myself any more. It was you I was talking about. That was advice, don’t you understand?”
She ran suddenly toward the house, holding her skirts high out of the dew. Reaching her own room she kicked off her slippers and threw herself on the bed in the darkness.
“I should have been careful,” she whispered to herself. “All my life I’ll be punished for not being more careful. I wrapped all my love up like a box of candy and gave it away.”
Her window was open and outside on the lawn the sad, dissonant horns were telling a melancholy story. A blackamoor was two-timing the lady to whom he had pledged faith. The lady warned him, in so many words, to stop fooling ‘round Sweet Jelly-Roll, even though Sweet Jelly-Roll was the color of pale cinnamon——
The phone on the table by her bed rang imperatively. Diana took up the receiver.
“Yes.”
“One minute please, New York calling.”
It flashed through Diana’s head that it was Charley—but that was impossible. He must be still on the train.
“Hello.” A woman was speaking. “Is this the Dickey residence?”
“Yes.”
“Well, is Mr. Charles Abbot there?”
Diana’s heart seemed to stop beating as she recognized the voice—it was the blonde girl of the cafe.
“What?” she asked dazedly.
“I would like to speak to Mr. Abbot at once please.”
“You—you can’t speak to him. He’s gone.”
There was a pause. Then the girl’s voice, suspiciously:
“He isn’t gone.”
Diana’s hands tightened on the telephone.
“I know who’s talking,” went on the voice, rising to a hysterical note, “and I want to speak to Mr. Abbot. If you’re not telling the truth, and he finds out, there’ll be trouble.”
“Be quiet!”
“If he’s gone, where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“If he isn’t at my apartment in half an hour I’ll know you’re lying and I’ll——”
Diana hung up the receiver and tumbled back on the bed—too weary of life to think or care. Out on the lawn the orchestra was singing and the words drifted in her window on the breeze.
Lis-sen while I—get you tole:
Stop foolin’ ‘roun’ sweet—Jelly-Roll——
She listened. The Negro voices were wild and loud—life was in that key, so harsh a key. How abominably helpless she was! Her appeal was ghostly, impotent, absurd, before the barbaric urgency of this other girl’s desire.
Just treat me pretty, just treat me sweet
Cause I possess a fo’ty-fo’ that don’t repeat.
The music sank to a weird, threatening minor. It reminded her of something—some mood in her own childhood—and a new atmosphere seemed to open up around her. It was not so much a definite memory as it was a current, a tide setting through her whole body.
Diana jumped suddenly to her feet and groped for her slippers in the darkness. The song was beating in her head and her little teeth set together in a click. She could feel the tense golf-muscles rippling and tightening along her arms.
Running into the hall she opened the door to her father’s room, closed it cautiously behind her and went to the bureau. It was in the top drawer—black and shining among the pale anaemic collars. Her hand closed around the grip and she drew out the bullet clip with steady fingers. There were five shots in it.
Back in her room she called the garage.
“I want my roadster at the side entrance right away!”
Wriggling hurriedly out of her evening dress to the sound of breaking snaps she let it drop in a soft pile on the floor, replacing it with a golf sweater, a checked sport-skirt and an old blue and white blazer which she pinned at the collar with a diamond bar. Then she pulled a tam-o-shanter over her dark hair and looked once in the mirror before turning out the light.
“Come on, Diamond Dick!” she whispered aloud.
With a short exclamation she plunged the automatic into her blazer pocket and hurried from the room.
Diamond Dick! The name had jumped out at her once from a lurid cover, symbolizing her childish revolt against the softness of life. Diamond Dick was a law unto himself, making his own judgments with his back against the wall. If justice was slow he vaulted into his saddle and was off for the foothills, for in the unvarying tightness of his instincts he was higher and harder than the law. She had seen in him a sort of deity, infinitely resourceful, infinitely just. And the commandment he laid down for himself in the cheap, ill-written pages was first and foremost to keep what was his own.
An hour and a half from the time when she had left Greenwich, Diana pulled up her roadster in front of the Restaurant Mont Mihiel. The theaters were already dumping their crowds into Broadway and half a dozen couples in evening dress looked at her curiously as she slouched through the door. A moment later she was talking to the head waiter.
“Do you know a girl named Elaine Russel?”
“Yes, Miss Dickey. She comes here quite often.”
“I wonder if you can tell me where she lives.”
The head waiter considered.
“Find out,” she said sharply, “I’m in a hurry.”
He bowed. Diana had come there many times with many men. She had never asked him a favor before.
His eyes roved hurriedly around the room.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’m all right. You hurry.”
He crossed the room and whispered to a man at a table—in a minute he was back with the address, an apartment on 49th Street.
In her car again she looked at her wrist watch—it was almost midnight, the appropriate hour. A feeling of romance, of desperate and dangerous adventure thrilled her, seemed to flow out of the electric signs and the rushing cabs and the high stars. Perhaps she was only one out of a hundred people bound on such an adventure tonight—for her there had been nothing like this since the war.
Skidding the corner into East 49th Street she scanned the apartments on both sides. There it was—“The Elkson”—a wide mouth of forbidding yellow light. In the hall a Negro elevator boy asked her name.
“Tell her it’s a girl with a package from the moving picture company.”
He worked a plug noisily.
“Miss Russel? There’s a lady here says she’s got a package from the moving picture company.”
A pause.
“That’s what she says… All right.” He turned to Diana. “She wasn’t expecting no package but you can bring it up.” He looked at her, frowned suddenly. “You ain’t got no package.”
Without answering she walked into the elevator and he followed, shoving the gate closed with maddening languor…
“First door to your right.”
She waited until the elevator door had started down again. Then she knocked, her fingers tightening on the automatic in her blazer pocket.
Running footsteps, a laugh; the door swung open and Diana stepped quickly into the room.
It was a small apartment, bedroom, bath and kitchenette, furnished in pink and white and heavy with last week’s smoke. Elaine Russel
